Lucie V.'s Reviews > A Soul of Ash and Blood

✅ First 10% and last 5%
✅ More vulnerable Cas
✅ Cas’ POV
✅ Some smut
🆗 Plot
🆗 Pace
🆗 Underwhelming in general
❗️❗️ Kind of cliffhanger
❗️❗️ Trigger warnings: death, emotional and physical abuse (same as in FBAA)

2.5 stars...

Well, this review is going to be short, because I do not have much to say about this book sadly… I just want to clarify that I do not think this is a bad book, simply that it’s too long, and it should have been a novella instead of book #5 of the series.

Only his memories can save her...

They made it sound way more dramatic than it is.
After the final battle at the end of A War of Two Queens, Poppy falls into a stasis and will remain in it until she completes the culling. Nektas remembers Nyktos’ consort going through the same thing and suggests that Cas talks to her while she is in stasis to make sure that she remembers who she is, and who Cas is, once she wakes up. Cas decides to take Nektas’ advice and tells Poppy about when he first met her and learned to know her. So this is mostly a retelling of From Blood and Ash but from Cas’ point of view.

I have mixed feelings about this book.
On one hand, I really love Cas, Kieran, and Delano, and I was happy to get more of them. I also loved seeing Cas’ side of the budding romance between Poppy and him and seeing the conflicted feelings and the angst he was living with. Overall, he felt more vulnerable in this book, which made him more likable to me. The beginning and the ending of the book were also great, and now I am very excited for the next book to come out.

On the other hand, this felt way too long, many chapters felt pointless, and I feel that this might be a little bit of a money grab? The author better wrap up this series nicely and soon, because I am having flashbacks from the whole Zodiac Academy debacle here (if you made it to book 8 of the ZA series, you probably know what I’m talking about)… She keeps adding books to her series, and I am not sure I’m liking it, even though I love the series as a whole and the characters.

I did enjoy reading from Cas’ point of view, but I did find this book too long, and honestly, I was hoping for more backstory to be integrated into this book. I was super excited for a few chapters, like Poppy and Cas’ meeting at the Red Pearl, or when he sees her fighting for the first time on the rise, but most of the chapters were just a repetition of the events in FBAA from Cas’ point of view and they didn’t add much to the plot or the character. The dialogues between Cas and Poppy were the same, obviously, and the conversations between Cas and other characters, you know the new stuff that we didn’t read already in FBAA, were not that relevant or interesting. After 4 long books, we already know Cas quite well, so this book didn’t make me like him more, or discover a new side of him. I would have definitely enjoyed having a few of those chapters sold in a novella, or maybe as “bonus content” more than having to push myself through 630 pages of repetitive stuff. The fact that I already knew what would happen also made it harder for me to remain engaged and not skim the chapters that I found more boring.

There were a few chapters set in the present, meaning right after the events of The War of Two Queens, and I was happy to know what happened to Ires, Millie, and Malik. It was also good that Cas and Malik finally got some time to sit and talk, they needed it so much because there were so many conflicted feelings and so much tension and unease between them in The War of Two Queens. Overall though, those chapters represent only about 15% of the book: 10% at the beginning, and 5% here and there in between Cas’ remembering the events from the first book.



1. From Blood and Ash ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
2. A Kingdom of Flesh and Fire ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
3. The Crown of Gilded Bones ⭐⭐⭐⭐.5
4. The War of Two Queens ⭐⭐⭐⭐.5
4.1 Cupcakes and Kisses ⭐⭐⭐


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